VANGUARD SPARES UPDATE

When I started looking after the Vanguard spares at the beginning of 2009, the stock was delivered to me, by the previous spares officer Paul Robins, in an LDV van which was slightly smaller than a Transit. It took me a few months to sort it all & rack it up in shelves in a large shed beside my house, together with an overflow storage area in a council lock up garage, which still gave me room to store my trailer tent in the same garage.

Over the years I’ve ploughed all the income from spares sales back into the purchase of more Vanguard spares, which I’ve acquired from various sources & has involved me ferrying spares in my trusty Mondeo hatchback, which luckily has the facility to fold the seats down to give me almost as much space as an estate car. I’ve collected spares from as far afield as Blackpool, Birmingham, Rugby, Bury St Edmunds, Gatwick, Letchworth & Biggin Hill amongst others. I’ve also had spares kindly delivered to me from Bristol by Steve Smeltzer. This together with various spares kindly acquired for me via ebay by Ian Leggett had swelled my spares store to also include a large part of my garage loft & part of my house loft. All these acquisitions have enabled me to improve my spares service to members

Now you are probably aware that the club have now also acquired the spares stock from the now defunct Vanguard Phase 1 & 2 club. This involved, as has previously been touched upon in previous articles, a “road trip” down to the wilds of Romney Marsh in two large Transit type vans to collect the aforesaid spares, which amounted to about 2.5tonnes in weight & almost double the volume of my original spares stock!! I am now busy trying to catalogue & store all these parts, many of which are quite bulky & heavy, and have now filled more of my loft areas at home, displaced my trailer tent from its home in the council lock up & necessitated me filling up another council lock up, in which I used to store my Vanguard 3, with the bulk of the heavier items . I’m dreading the day when I have to downsize & move house!!!

The selection of photos accompanying this feature gives some idea of the amount of parts now available to members, which I hope will enable all you Vanguard owners to keep your cars on the road in the years to come. As always there will be parts that I haven’t got in stock, but hopefully I can point you in the direction of finding your required part! So please keep buying the parts you need for your various cars & restoration projects & if possible please provide the part numbers when enquiring as it saves me a lot of time thumbing through all my parts books & spares lists.

To see Peter's latest list of over 2000 Vanguard spares lines, as a spreadsheet, please click here